The present invention relates to an aggregation system, and relates in particular to an aggregation system that can order by aggregating at high speed through a communications network such as the Internet the information that is operated by multiple users in a short period of time.
To date, systems that aggregate the voting information, etc., operated by viewers (users) in conjunction with viewer participation programs for television and reflect this in the program, have been proposed. For example, Patent Document 1 noted below discloses a system that collects the voting information of viewers through the Internet by means of a WWW server.
Patent Document 1: Japanese Patent Publication No. 2002-344928
Conventional WWW server systems like that described in the aforementioned document are composed for example of a load balancer, http server, RDB server, etc. However, there are the following problems with making these apparatuses high-speed apparatuses.
In a layer 7 load balancer (loaded with a session control function), there has been a limit to the speed in decoding the application protocol for transferring the same user to the same http server, or for processing that specifies a http server while searching for the past information that is being retained. In addition, there has also been the problem that a proportionate expansion of equipment is not possible in order to carry out load distribution based on the user information that is retained.
The limits on performance due to the parallel deployment of http servers (loaded with a session control function and table cache function) depend on RDB. There has been the problem that compatibility with the other http servers arranged in parallel is not achieved if the same user does not process with the same http server. The reason is that this is cached so that a load is not exerted on the RDB server.
Given that the RDB server is RDB, it is not possible to strengthen performance in proportion to the cost, and there has been the problem that it is not possible to respond to concentrated access even if an extremely high cost system is used.
In addition, in conventional systems like those described above, in the event, for example, that an ordering is attempted in the order of the users who send the correct answer operation earliest, based for example on the operation information of the responses to a quiz sent by a user, ordering processing is carried out for all the user information in the WWW server, but in the event that a plurality of WWW servers is set up in order to make the processing high-speed, it is necessary to carry out the ordering processing by collecting the operation information, etc. of the users in one server, and to distribute the results to a plurality of WWW servers.
However, the amount of data to be forwarded becomes large when all the user data is solely collected from each WWW server, or the order result data is distributed, and in addition the load of the processing for ordering by integrating the collected data, or for reflecting the ordered information in the user data in each WWW server, becomes large, and there is thus the problem that time is required until the results appear. The purpose of the present invention is to solve conventional problems like those described above.
Further objects and advantages of the invention will be apparent from the following description of the invention.